A Time of Gifts (11 page)

In England, the Burgomaster, with his white hair and moustache, his erect bearing and grey tweeds, might have been colonel of a good line regiment. After dinner he tucked a cigar in a holder made of a cardboard cone and a quill, changed spectacles and, hunting through a pile of music on the piano, sat down and attacked the Waldstein Sonata with authority and verve. The pleasure was reinforced by the player's enjoyment of his capacity to wrestle with it. His expression of delight, as he peered at the notes through a veil of cigar smoke and tumbling ash, was at odds with the gravity of the music. It was a surprise; so different was it from
an evening spent with his putative English equivalent; and when the last chord had been struck, he leapt from the stool with a smile of youthful and almost ecstatic enjoyment amid the good-humoured applause of his family. A rush of appraisal broke out, and hot argument about possible alternative interpretations.

* * *

There was no doubt about it, I thought next day: I'd taken a wrong turning. Instead of reaching Pforzheim towards sunset, I was plodding across open fields with snow and the night both falling fast. My new goal was a light which soon turned out to be the window of a farmhouse by the edge of a wood. A dog had started barking. When I reached the door a man's silhouette appeared in the threshold and told the dog to be quiet and shouted: “Wer ist da?” Concluding that I was harmless, he let me in.

A dozen faces peered up in surprise, their spoons halted in mid air, and their features, lit from below by a lantern on the table, were as gnarled and grained as the board itself. Their clogs were hidden in the dark underneath, and the rest of the room, except for the crucifix on the wall, was swallowed by shadow. The spell was broken by the unexpectedness of the irruption:
A stranger from Ausland!
Shy, amazed hospitality replaced earlier fears and I was soon seated among them on the bench and busy with a spoon as well.

The habit of grasping and speaking German had been outpaced during the last few days by another change of accent and idiom. These farmhouse sentences were all but out of reach. But there was something else here that was enigmatically familiar. Raw knuckles of enormous hands, half clenched still from the grasp of ploughs and spades and bill-hooks, lay loose among the cut onions and the chipped pitchers and a brown loaf broken open. Smoke had blackened the earthenware tureen and the light caught its pewter ladle and stressed the furrowed faces, and the bricky cheeks of young and hemp-haired giants...A small crone in a pleated
coif sat at the end of the table, her eyes bright and timid in their hollows of bone and all these puzzled features were flung into relief by a single wick from below. Supper at Emmaus or Bethany? Painted by whom?

Dog-tired from the fields, the family began to stretch and get down the moment the meal was over and to amble bedwards with dragging clogs. A grandson, apologizing because there was no room indoors, slung a pillow and two blankets over his shoulder, took the lantern and led the way across the yard. In the barn the other side, harrows, ploughshares, scythes and sieves loomed for a moment, and beyond, tethered to a manger that ran the length of the barn, horns and tousled brows and liquid eyes gleamed in the lantern's beam. The head of a cart-horse, with a pale mane and tail and ears pricked at our advent, almost touched the rafters.

When I was alone I stretched out on a bed of sliced hay like a crusader on his tomb, snugly wrapped up in greatcoat and blankets, with crossed legs still putteed and clodhoppered. Two owls were within earshot. The composite smell of snow, wood, dust, cobwebs, mangolds, beetroots, fodder, cattlecake and the cows' breath was laced with an ammoniac tang from the plip-plop and the splash that sometimes broke the rhythm of the munching and the click of horns. There was an occasional grate of blocks and halters through their iron rings, a moo from time to time, or a huge horseshoe scraping or clinking on the cobbles. This was more like it!

The eaves were stiff with icicles next morning. Everyone was out of the kitchen and already at work, except the old woman in the coif. She gave me a scalding bowl of coffee and milk with dark brown bread broken in it. Would an offer to pay be putting my foot in it, I wondered; and then tentatively proposed it. There was no offence; but, equally, it was out of the question: “Nee, nee!” she said, with a light pat of her transparent hand. (It sounded the same as the English ‘Nay.') The smile of her totally dismantled gums had the innocence of an infant's. “Gar nix!” After farewells, she called me back with a shrill cry and put a foot-long slice of buttered black bread in my hand; I ate my way along this gigantic and
delicious butterbrot as I went, and after a furlong, caught sight of all the others. They waved and shouted “Gute Reise!” They were hacking at the frost-bitten grass with mattocks, delving into a field that looked and sounded as hard as iron.

Stick-nail fetishism carried me to Mühlacker, all of two miles off my way, in order to get the local stocknagel hammered on, the seventeenth. It was becoming a fixation.

Of the town of Pforzheim, where I spent the next night, I remember nothing. But the evening after I was in the heart of Stuttgart by lamp-lighting time, sole customer in a café opposite the cubistic mass of the Hotel Graf Zeppelin. Snow and sleet and biting winds had emptied the streets of all but a few scuttling figures, and two cheerless boys doggedly rattling a collection box. Now they had vanished as well and the proprietor and I were the only people in sight in the whole capital of Württemberg. I was writing out the day's doings and vaguely wondering where to find lodging when two cheerful and obviously well-brought up girls came in, and began buying groceries at the counter. They were amusingly dressed in eskimo hoods, furry boots and gauntlets like grizzly bears which they clapped together to dispel the cold. I wished I knew them... The sleet, turning to hail, rattled on the window like grapeshot. One of the girls, who wore horn-rimmed spectacles, catching sight of my German-English dictionary, daringly said “How do you do, do, Mister Brown?” (This was the only line of an idiotic and now mercifully forgotten song, repeated ad infinitum like
Lloyd George Knew My Father
; it had swept across the world two years before.) Then she laughed in confusion at her boldness, under a mild reproof from her companion. I jumped up and implored them to have a coffee, or anything... They suddenly became more reserved: “Nein, nein, besten Dank, aber wir müssen weg!” I looked crestfallen; and after an exchange of “Warum nicht?”s, they consented to stay five minutes, but refused coffee.

The line of the song was almost the only English they knew. My first interlocutrix, who had taken her spectacles off, asked how old I was. I said “Nineteen,” though it wouldn't be quite true for
another five weeks. “We too!” they said. “And what do you do?” “I'm a student.” “We too!
Wunderbar!
” They were called Elizabeth-Charlotte, shortened to Liselotte or Lise—and Annie. Lise was from Donaueschingen, where the Danube rises, in the Black Forest, but she was living in Annie's parents' house in Stuttgart, where they were studying music. Both were pretty. Lise had unruly brown hair and a captivating and lively face, from which a smile was never absent for long; her glance, with her spectacles off, was wide, unfocussed and full of trusting charm. Annie's fair hair was plaited and coiled in earphones, a fashion I'd always hated; but it suited her pallor and long neck and gave her the look of a Gothic effigy from the door of an abbey. They told me they were buying things for a young people's party in celebration of the
Dreikönigsfest
. It was Epiphany, the 6th of January, the feast of the Three Kings. After some whispered confabulation, they decided to have pity on me and take me with them. Lise enterprisingly suggested we could invent a link with her family—“falls sie fragen, wo wir Sie aufgegabelt haben” (“Just in case they ask where we forked you out from”). Soon, in the comfortable bathroom of Annie's absent parents—he was a bank manager and they were away in Basel on business—I was trying to make myself presentable: combing my hair, putting on the clean shirt and flannel bags I had extracted before leaving my rucksack in charge of the café. I hadn't fixed up anything for the night yet, they said, when I rejoined them: it was unorthodox and would be uncomfortable—but would I like to doss down on the sofa? “No, no, no!” I cried: far too much of a nuisance for them, after all their kindness; but I didn't insist too long. “Don't say you're staying here!” Annie said. “You know how silly people are.” There was a feeling of secrecy and collusion in all this, like plans for a midnight feast. They were thrilled by their recklessness. So was I.

Collusion looked like breaking down when we got to the party. “Can I introduce,” Annie began. “Darf ich Ihnen vorstellen—.” Her brow puckered in alarm; we hadn't exchanged surnames. Lise quickly chimed in with “Mr. Brown, a family friend.” She might
have been a captain of hussars, turning the tide of battle by a brilliant swoop. Later a cake was ceremoniously cut, and a girl was crowned with a gold cardboard crown. Songs were sung in honour of Epiphany and the Magi, some in unison, some solo. Asked if there were any English ones (as I had hoped, in order to show Lise and Annie I wasn't a godless barbarian), I sang
We Three Kings of Orient Are
. A later song, celebrating the Neckar Valley and Swabia, was sung in complex harmony. I can't remember the words completely, but it has stuck in my mind ever since. I put it down here as I've never met anyone who knows it.

Then someone put
Couchés dans le foin
on the gramophone, and
Sentimental Journey
, and everyone danced.

* * *

When I woke up on the sofa—rather late; we had sat up talking and drinking Annie's father's wine before going to bed—I had no idea where I was; it was a frequent phenomenon on this journey. But when I found my hands muffled like a pierrot's in the scarlet silk sleeves of Annie's father's pyjamas, everything came back to me. He must have been a giant (a photograph on the piano of a handsome ski-booted trio in the snow—my host with his arms round his wife and daughter—bore this out). The curtains were still drawn and two dressing-gowned figures were tiptoeing about the shadows. When they realized I was awake at last, greetings
were exchanged and the curtains drawn. It only seemed to make the room very few degrees lighter. “Look!” Lise said, “no day for walking!” It was true: merciless gusts of rain were thrashing the roofscape outside. Nice weather for young ducks. “Armer Kerl!—Poor chap!” she said, “you'll have to be our prisoner till tomorrow.” She put on another log and Annie came in with coffee. Halfway through breakfast, Sunday morning bells began challenging each other from belfry to belfry. We might have been in a submarine among sunk cathedrals. “O Weh!” Lise cried, “I ought to be in church!”; then, peering at the streaming panes: “Too late now.” “Zum Beichten, perhaps,” Annie said. (
Beichten
is confession.) Lise asked: “What for?” “Picking up strangers.” (Lise was Catholic, Annie Protestant; there was a certain amount of sectarian banter.) I urged their claim to every dispensation for sheltering the needy, clothing the naked—a flourish of crimson sleeve supported this—and feeding the hungry. Across the boom of all these bells a marvellous carillon broke out. It is one of the most famous things in Stuttgart. We listened until its complicated pattern faded into silence.

The evening presented a problem in advance. They were ineluctably bidden to a dinner party by a business acquaintance of Annie's father, and though they didn't like him they couldn't plausibly chuck it. But what was to become of me? At last, screwing up their courage, Annie rang his wife up: could they bring a young English friend of Lise's family—informally clad, because he was on a winter walking tour across Europe? (It sounded pretty thin.) There was a twitter of assent from the other end; the receiver was replaced in triumph. She, it seemed, was very nice; he was an industrialist—
steinreich
, rolling—“You'll get plenty to eat and drink!” —Annie said he was a great admirer of Lise's. “No,
no
!” Lise cried, “of Annie's!” “He's awful! You'll see! You must defend us both.”

We were safe till ten o'clock next morning, when the maid's bus got back; she had gone to her Swabian village for the Dreikönigsfest. We drew the curtains to block out the deluge and put on the lights—it was best to treat the dismal scene outside as if it were
night—and lolled in dishabille all the morning talking by the fire. I played the gramophone—
St. Louis Blues, Stormy Weather, Night and Day
—while the girls ironed their dresses for the dinner party and the submarine morning sped by, until it was time for Annie and me to face the weather outdoors: she for luncheon—a weekly fixture with relations—me to collect my stuff and to buy some eggs for an omelette. Out-of-doors, even in a momentary lull, the rain was fierce and hostile and the wind was even worse. When Annie got back about five, I was doing a sketch of Lise; an attempt at Annie followed; then I taught them how to play Heads-Bodies-and-Legs. They took to this with a feverish intensity and we played until tolling bells reminded us how late it was. In my case, all that a flat-iron and a brush and comb could achieve had been done. But the girls emerged from their rooms like two marvellous swans. The door bell rang. It was the first sign of the outer world since my invasion, and a bit ominous. “It's the car! He always sends one. Everything in style!”

Downstairs, a chauffeur in leggings held his cap aloft as he opened the door of a long Mercedes. When we had rustled in he enveloped us in bearskin from the waist down. “You see?” the girls said, “High life!”